Date of Award

9-20-2010

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Education (EdD)

Department

Educational Leadership

First Advisor

Ibrahim Duyar

Abstract

The two-fold purpose of the study was to determine whether or not the Arkansas Leadership Academy's Master Principal Institute's (MPI) five curriculum content standards were aligned with the literature of effective educational leadership practices, and to ascertain if there were significant relationships among the principals' leadership practices that were related to improved student achievement as measured by the annual Arkansas Benchmark Examinations. In determining the alignment of the curriculum standards of the MPI with current research for the first research question, an assessment matrix (Appendix A) was developed by the researcher, which contains the curriculum standards and the research content focus on effective leadership practices. Data was provided by the Arkansas Leadership Academy of the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville from each principal's portfolio data which included their overall scores, plus sub-scores on the contextual reference letters and on the five curriculum content standards. It is conclusive that the study reveals that the standards being taught to practicing principals are supported by the current literature on practices of effective leadership. To answer the second research question, other data utilized in this research included data on each content standard of the curriculum as generated through a scoring process by raters who used rubrics to determine each principal's score for each of the curriculum content areas. A sample was selected to achieve the goal of investigating a focus group, the Phase II MPI participants. The population identified was schools (n = 44) of different grade span configurations to include grades 4, 6, and 8 which were divided into two groups. The treatment group included K-8 schools (nT = 22) whose principals had completed Phase II of the MPI professional development training, and the comparison group included K-8 schools (nC = 22) whose principals had not received the professional development training. Data collection from the Arkansas Department of Education's website included gathering the results of the Arkansas Benchmark Examinations for grades 4, 6, and 8 in mathematics and literacy for 2003, 2004, and 2005 school years. There were three independent variables: treatment schools with MPI principal training and comparison schools without MPI principal training (two levels of training), levels of performance of Benchmark Examinations (four levels), and years included in the study (a repeated measure). There were two dependent variables, the performance levels of the mathematics and literacy scores. Because the interval data (the scaled scores) were categorized into ordinal data (the performance levels), the data were analyzed in two ways. The results of the doubly multivariate two-factor MANOVA revealed no statistically significant differences for the combined percents of proficient and advanced percentage scores for the main effect of MPI training, and the MPI training by time interaction effect (partial η²2 = .03 and partial η²2 = .09, respectively). However, there was a statistically significant time effect (partial η²2 = .80). The follow-up univariate analyses of the time effect of year revealed statistically significant differences in the combined proficient and advanced percentage scores for both mathematics and literacy (partial η²2 = .24 and partial η²2 = .37, respectively). The results of the regression analysis inter-correlations revealed that the estimated strength of the relationship of one of the predictors, vision/mission training, correlated moderately with student achievement.

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